5th June 2015

A SENSE OF PROPORTION

Just a quick blog this time with more next week I promise. I had some useful feedback last week from someone who pointed out that our images do not give enough of a sense of scale of what we find and that we have rather been neglecting reporting coin discoveries of late in favour of our shiny gold.

I can address this in part by the above picture of Viki standing behind the hoard. I asked Viki because, as I'm sure she won't mind me saying, she's a woman of normal size. I could have asked Georgia, my other colleague, but she is a tiny person and pictures of her always give an unrealistic view of how big the hoard (and indeed individual coins) are. Below is Viki's hand which gives a good idea how big the torques are. I will ask those on the team with a better knowledge of coins than myself to pick out a selection for next week and I'll do a blog just about them.

We continue to make good progress here. We checked our May figures and we can see that we are now treating about 850 coins per week which is pretty much double what we were acheiving before our team of helpers came on board so a big thank you to them. We seem to have stabilized at finding about one large jewellery item a week with no end in sight now so we can't complain about that.

We are leaving all of the torques and other pieces in situ at the moment while we take the whole surface down about 50mm. We are probably two thirds of the way there now and when this layer is all exposed we will record it thoroughly by photograph and 3D laser scan. We will then remove all the revealed jewellery and start down on the next layer.